Two anti-American Peas in a Pod

Hugo Chavez & Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Here is a picture that made my blood run cold. Venezualan Socialist strongman Chavez and Islamo-fascist Iranian president Ahmadinejad sitting together no doubt thinking about how to destroy the Americans and the Jews in one fell swoop.

To paraphrase Ann Coulter, we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and take their oil. Not a very enlightened sentiment but hey, what do you expect from a right wing nut job.

The Law is on Bush's Side

The controversy that wasn't continues to play out in the MSM with various talking heads expressing/feigning shock and outrage at the President's authorization of wiretaps on some international calls and e-mails. Much has been made of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and how some feel that President Bush has violated the act. This is despite the fact that as recently as 2002 the FISA Court of Review said that "the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence...We take for granted that the president does have that authority." The issue can not be explained any clearer than that.
Further evidence that the President is well within his rights is the history of executive orders that have made changes to FISA since its inception in 1978.
First ,on May 23 1979, Jimmy Carter issued an executive order which was number 12139 entitled "Exercise of Certain Authority Respecting Electronic Surveillance". Section 1-101 of the order states:
"Pursuant to Section 102(a)(1) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978(50U.S.C. 1802(a)), the Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order, but only if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that Section."
The President has made it very clear in his numerous addresses since the story ran in the NYT that the Attorney General has been consulted on every occasion of renewal of the program just as required.
Secondly, on February 13, 1995, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12949 . This order titled Foreign Intelligence Physical Searches states in Section 1:
"Pursuant to section 302(a)(1) of the Act(referring to FISA), the Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year, if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section."
These are two recent orders that speak directly to the current situation and show that the President was working completely within legal boundaries. The most delicious part is that the orders were written by Democrats. Oh the irony!

Gasping but Not Dead Yet

The Senate tonight reached a compromise to extend the Patriot Act as it presently stands for six months. The extension is longer than the three months proposed by Schumer and Co. but it is far from the full four year extension sought by the President and the Dept of Homeland Security and approved earlier by the House. Included in the deal is the possibility to revisit the sixteen expiring provisions and try to fix what opponents see as "civil rights issues". So, basically, in six months this whole ridiculous circus will start anew. Click here for a link to the story.

A Voice from the Clinton Justice Department

John Schmitt, former associate attorney general of the United States from 1994-1997,wrote an article today laying out why President Bush has the legal authority to authorize wiretaps. Mr. Schmitt states that the action taken by President Bush "is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Departments under prior presidents."Click here for the link to the article in today's Chicago Tribune.

This past Thursday and Friday our national security was the recipient of a one-two punch by two separate but intimately linked events.
The first blow was delivered by the media wing of the DNC at the New York Times. I'm referring of course to the article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau on 12/15 in which classified intelligence secrets were yet again splashed across the front page in the hopes of influencing the legislature and harming the Bush administration. The timing of the release the day of the important cloture vote in the Senate to end debate on the renewal of the Patriot act should leave no doubt as to the complicitous nature of the relation between the NYT and the Democrats. Chuck Schumer was holding a copy of the Friday NYT on the floor of the Senate and referred to it while he was debating the Patriot Act extension. No need to read between the lines there. The MSM once again shows it is willing to put the political agenda of the left ahead of national security.
This leads me to the second punch which was the refusal by the Senate on Friday to reauthorize major portions of the Patriot Act past the December 31st deadline. By a vote of 52-47, with 5 Republicans voting no and 2 Democrats voting yes, supporters did not achieve the 60 vote super-majority that was needed to stop the filibuster and call a vote. Now there are 16 provisions of the Patriot Act which were not made permanent in the original passage, including the controversial roving wiretaps and secret warrants for books and records provisions, that will expire at the end of the year taking away valuable weapons for intelligence gathering and usage from the agencies trying to keep America safe.
Critics charge that these provisions infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens. The fact is that in the four years since passage of the Patriot Act there have been no verifiable abuses of any provisions. This is most evident by the fact that there have been no claims or lawsuits filed pursuant to Section 223 of the Patriot Act which created the ability to sue for money damage for any person aggrieved by the violation of the Act. You know that if there were violations that could lead to big lawsuit payouts the lawyers would be lined up around the block filing suits ad infinitum.
So to recap we have now alerted the terrorists to yet another weapon we are using against them and taken away multiple other weapons that have been working for the past four years. We start the week less safe and protected as a country than we were last week. This is cause for great concern because the terrorists job just got easier.

No Pardon for Tookie

Albert Owens, 26
Yen-I Yang, 76
Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, 63
Yu-Chin Yang Lin, 43
These are the names and ages of the people who were brutally murdered by Tookie Williams in 1979. With all the attention being paid to the plight of poor Tookie lately, I thought it would be a good idea to remind everyone who his victims were because I have not seen one celebrity or activist speak up for them.
Tookie is set to die in under one hour,suffering the ultimate penalty for his crimes, and he has yet to voice anything approaching remorse for the murders which he committed. Tookie has never renounced his gang affiliation despite the bloodshed and violence that his creation, the Crips, has wrought upon the people of LA and the rest of the country. He can write all the children's books he wants but there is no way to atone for a life of evil that has effected generations.
You must reap what you sow and the plants that have sprung from Tookie's seed are still killing people to this day.

Retreat and Defeat

Yesterday the RNC released a web ad of some of the greatest hits of the past week from leaders of the Dems. If you haven't seen the White Flag video on GOP.com then click the link and check it out, it's fantastic.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!

The good economic news keeps rolling in. We learned today that 215,000 new jobs were created in November. So much for the gloom and doomers(read Democrats) who have been hoping for some bad news so that they can blame the President. It appears that the big Katrina/Wilma economic downturn that they were licking their lips over is not going to materialize. I guess Howard Dean was wrong again when he said during the campaign last year "You can't have taxcuts and new job creation". Quelle domage!

Well, it's getting towards the end of the week and a mighty fine week it's been for our economy. Here are some highlights.
Monday we found that the holiday weekend sales were up over last year by 22% with a total receipt, including online sales, of $27.8 billion. On Tuesday the Consumer Confidence Index was reported to have risen from 85.2 in October to 98.9 in November, exceeding analyst estimates of 90 and up for the first time in two months.
Today we received reports from the Commerce Department that personal income and spending rose along with construction spending for the month of October. The almighty dollar has been up against the euro and other foreign currencies this week and the Dow Jones is tickling 11,000. These are all good signs of economic strength.
The biggest news came today with the quarterly Gross Domestic Product(GDP) numbers being released. The GDP increased at a rate of 4.3% for the third quarter which spanned the months of July through September. This was the biggest increase in over a year. Projections and estimates ranged from a 3.5% to 4 % increase according to analysts. It should not be lost on anyone that this was the time of both Katrina and Wilma, had they not occurred it is reasonable to believe we would have had a rise of 5% or more.
Finally on the jobs front, October saw an increase of only 56,ooo jobs. This is a notably small increase to be sure but it beats the job loss of September due to the storms. Remember unemployment is a lagging indicator, this means it is one of the last numbers to show a change in response to changes in the economy. Tomorrow the employment report for November comes out and many reports predict a 200,000 job increase, so let's keep watching.